Mary Sue Got a Makeover

Dana Scully walked past the bubbling fountain centered in
the wide, manicured lawn and stepped through the door of the two-story colonial
home she shared with her husband. A scrumptious scent of roasting meat wafted
in the air as she strode quickly down the hall. She reached the kitchen, hung
with her favorite pink floral chintz wallpaper and fairly exploding with
milky-white gardenia blossoms floating in crystal bowls.

Behind the island
stovetop, her husband, Fox Mulder, was wearing a white chef's toque, a crisp
white apron and nothing else. Between his long legs he held an enormous magnum
of champagne, which he was struggling to open by pulling mightily on the cork
in a suggestive motion that made Scully think more of bed than of breakfast.
Hearing her heels tap briskly on the polished hardwood floor, Mulder looked up,
his hazel eyes glowing with love.

"Scully!"
he exclaimed. "You're home at last!"

Scully blinked
in surprise. She and Mulder had agreed earlier that they wouldn't make a big
deal of their wedding anniversary – she hadn't expected any fanfare tonight.

"Your
mother came and picked up our darling little Foxena and our poodle, William,
for the night. I've taken care of everything, so you just go upstairs and put
on that teeny-tiny black negligee, and I'll be right up with the duck..."

So now you’re
thinking, “How can that be a Mary-Sue story? It’s got no original character to
serve as the author surrogate!”

Wrong. That
snippet is most definitely a Mary-Sue.

The scenario above
is not Dana Scully's fantasy. And it sure as heck isn't Fox Mulder's fantasy.
If you've ever written something even remotely like the snippet above, it's your
fantasy, and you've written a Mary-Sue story.

Now, if you came
in here looking for a diatribe railing against all Mary-Sue stories and
recommending that their authors should be shot, you're going to be
disappointed. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with Mary-Sues.
Yes, many of them are abominably written. But that's true of all types of
fanfic. And yes, almost all Mary-Sues take great liberties with canon. But
Mary-Sues don't have a corner on that market, either.

Truth is, there's
a little Mary-Sue in almost all fanfic stories, and nearly all fanfic writers
have written one or more Mary-Sue stories (you know who you are). A major
motivation for writing fanfic is to play with the characters in situations the
TV series would never allow, to show them doing things they wouldn't do on TV,
to give them a little of ourselves and our fantasies. And that's all a Mary-Sue
story does.

The real question
is, how much of yourself you put into the character(s) and the story...and
whether you're a good enough writer to disguise the fact that it's really all
about you.

It used to be easy
to tell a Mary-Sue story from a mile away. Almost inevitably they featured an
original character, usually female, who served as a thinly veiled surrogate for
the author. This character then met up with a male character from the series in
some (frequently improbable) way. (In X Files stories, often the
Mary-Sue character found a thoroughly soused Mulder in a bar. Just nevermind
that Mulder rarely drinks very much and almost never appears to go to bars
except in the line of duty.) Usually, though not always, the original
character/author surrogate and the series character end up engaging in
hot-monkey sex with each other that goes on for pages and pages. In fact, it’s
not unusual to find that not much else happens in these stories.

This story pattern
has been used so much and has become so obvious (not to mention so universally
reviled) that it's been all but abandoned. Nowadays, most Mary-Sues don't
feature an original character as a love interest for the series lead – instead
they use a character from the series and change his/her characteristics so that
he/she becomes virtually indistinguishable from the author.

Apparently people
seem to think it’s possible to shed the “Mary-Sue” stigma by using a character
from the series, as if merely failing to give the original character a
different name could somehow prevent the story from being a Mary-Sue – or
perhaps the idea is that if the author surrogate character is named Dana
Scully, no one will notice that she’s filling in for Mary Sue.

In other words,
denial is not just a river in Egypt; it’s also a fanfic technique.

The clear mark
ofthis kind of Mary-Sue story is that
at least one of the characters exhibits behavior in a romantic situation that
is completely out of character with the portrayal in the TV series. Even if you
believe that Mulder and Scully are made for each other and are destined to
marry, nothing that’s ever aired on The X Files suggests that they would
live in a darling, two-story suburban home with a garden full of tomato plants
and a Persian cat for a pet. There is absolutely no clear evidence in the
series that either of them have ever had any such ambitions, especially with
regard to the tomatoes.

Furthermore, as
she's portrayed in the series, “sweetie” is just not a word Scully uses, except
perhaps when talking to children or being extremely sarcastic. Mulder does not
prepare duck, not while dressed in an apron or anything else. That's not his
fantasy or Scully's. If you're writing Scully and Mulder that way, you're
writing a Mary-Sue, and it's yourself and your own fantasies you're writing
about.

It’s equally
common to find a slash story in which one of the male characters has been
turned into an author surrogate, although most slash authors are female. If you
took the snippet above and changed the names from Scully and Mulder to Richie
and Methos, you’d have a Highlander Mary-Sue story (in most cases, it’s
Richie who becomes the author-surrogate). Believe it or not, I’ve read some
stories frighteningly like that snippet, but instead of Scully and Mulder, the
characters were Blair and Jim (The Sentinel) or Garak and Bashir (Star
Trek: Deep Space 9). And those stories were unquestionably Mary-Sues.

Bottom line: If
Jim Ellison starts cooing Shakespearean sonnets into Blair’s shell-like ears or
Richie Ryan gives up motorcycle riding to learn to read Egyptian hieroglyphics
so he can have more quality time with Methos, make no mistake about it – that
story’s a Mary-Sue.

What’s wrong with
that? Nothing. It’s your story; write what you want. That’s the beauty of
fanfic – nobody can tell you what to write or how to write it. But good
writers, like good actors, eventually learn to portray people who aren’t
themselves.

And the truth is
that neither your life nor your fantasies are anywhere near as interesting as
Scully’s or Mulder’s – especially if your idea of a fantasy involves changing
diapers and/or putting up chintz curtains. (Look, I’ve changed diapers and put
up curtains. Neither is romantic or exciting.) And if readers prefer to imagine
Dana Scully making arrests, as opposed to coping with diapers or curtains, who
can blame them? Most of us are boring people with mundane lives. That’s why we
like shows like The X Files and reading fanfic based on those shows;
they let us break out of that dull mold for a while.

In other words, if
you write Scully chasing mutants with her gun drawn, I’m there. I’m down for it
if she and Mulder are doing the horizontal tango in the back of a Lariat rental
car, as long as they’re not calling each other “my little cabbage-blossom,”
even if he got turned on by the sight of Scully nursing their moppet. But the
minute one of them refers to the other as “snookums” or Mulder volunteers to
dust the knick-knacks while Scully carves radish roses, I’m hitting delete.

So, if you're
wondering why people aren't reading or recommending your stories, or why
they're flaming you for your characterizations, it could be because you've
taken a character they love and given him or her a makeover – you’ve turned
that character into yourself.